


The Mock

by perryvic



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:33:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perryvic/pseuds/perryvic





	The Mock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jenett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenett/gifts).



You don’t so much walk the streets in London around Christmas as push your way through crowds, although wearing uniform meant that the jostling was down to a minimum even as I ‘maintained a visible police presence’ that DCI Seawoll had mentioned in the briefing – right after the now traditional “ What the fuck are you doing here?” greeting he seemed to use whenever he saw my face.

 It happened pretty much every year - Oxford street lights went up, people flocked to the capitol as if the stores there held the answer to all their Christmas prayers rather than the ones in their own homes and that meant police got redistributed temporarily. On the plus side it meant Guleed and I had now acquired the skill to point the direction to Hamleys and Harrods from pretty much anywhere in London. A handy addition to a Somali Ninja’s arsenal at the very least, and one I could proudly tell Nightingale about when he next asked me why I hadn’t memorised my readings.  
Still,  it was a few days before Christmas itself, I hadn’t done any shopping myself – that’s what the internet was for, so in between being alert for all the signs we had done on our most recent Prevent training, and collaring the odd shoplifter, I was pretty much window shopping and working out what I could squeeze into the approximately 10 minutes of free time I had before I saw everyone at Christmas.

 “What do you think I should get Nightingale?” I asked. I was getting the hang on magic-proofing gadgets, but he preferred not to use them. Probably habit, thinking about it. He had far too many years to get comfortable with doing things in a different way and suddenly computers and PC’s and mobile doodads were a pretty late addition into the mix.

It was basically a habit of a man who was resolute in staying time-tied to both world wars. I figured if we had another one, he might take to technology. Maybe although every now and then he gave me indications he was cherry picking the useful bits from the dross.

“Gloves.” She had a wry look in her eye. “Nice belt?”

"He does wear gloves," I commented. Strange really, I hadn't really considered whether that affected how you produced forma.  "Seems a bit... dull though." I glanced at the very high end watch he'd given me the previous Christmas even as my phone rang.

Walid. That was promising.

Gileed sighed, gesturing to a grey pair in a window that made me think of turn of the century magicians. “Quality makes it exciting. Just saying. Shop hipster.” She went quiet as I answered, and seemed keen in getting a good eavesdropping.

“Peter, I’ve got a... tricky situation. Can you come over? I can’t raise Nightingale.”

"He was called in by Mama Thames over at Wapping" I replied. I didn't need to explain that no one said no to her if they wanted to live in London without permanent wet feet. "Are we talking something Falcon?" I was trying very hard not to sound like I was begging for it to be ‘weird bollocks’ as Seawoll often told me, but let’s face it, I was.

“A body had a piece of wood in it and some interesting… effects. I want you to come down to... well, it’s a learning experience.”

Guleed rocked on her heels, peering at me, reading my expression.

"Okay." I glanced at her.  "I'll call the DCI, tell him I've got a possible."

I could practically hear Guleed roll her eyes. Yeah, she knew I was going to be ditching her - the only upside was that they liked us to patrol in pairs so she would probably end up back at the station.

“Thanks.” He hung up, then, and Guleed made the get on with it gesture.

“Do I get to see the body?”

"I'll ask the DCI," I promised. She'd probably deal with the autopsy better than I would, but it was up to Seawoll. Chances were she might at least be put on the  Homicide Assessment  car if Seawoll recalled her.

A brief phone call later and Guleed was headed back to Belgravia giving me glares as she went as if I had denied her a favourite treat and I was on my way to see my two favourite doctors.

I probably had denied her a favourite treat, which was sort of why I enjoyed patrolling with her. For all she gave me a hard time over it, fact of the matter was she hadn’t freaked out and lost her shit at what we had dealt with. The Met breeds resilient people, but there’s a long walk between tolerating something and being comfortable with it.

 Any way, Dr Walid sounding concerned about a body was... interesting, and I made my way down to autopsy, running possibilities through my mind.

A  chunk of wood in a body wasn't particularly supernatural in origin. PC Allsop would frequently pull out his story of the time he'd attended a murder scene and found the guy impaled by a broken tennis racket. But for it to be referred to The Folly's go-to-pathology guys, there had to be something visible there marking it as odd.

Glowing skin, funny colors, smells, noises that didn’t belong with a dead body, those were usually why the Folly got a corpse.

Dr Vaughan was there intent on her work as Walid tossed me a mask. "Took your time," she said. "Here we have a Harold Trescothick according to his wallet… or what is left of him."

"Like the cricketer?" I asked putting it on. I was getting better at sounding nonchalant, though nobody can really describe the smell of an autopsy. It’s pretty unique blend of metallic, decay, antiseptic, almost burned smells and organic…stenches. I’d recognise it as a vestigium instantly, that much is for certain.

"Aside from him not being called Marcus, yes," Jennifer answered, her usual level of sarcasm bleeding through. "And being covered in green sigils and a lot of his internal organs being catastrophically effected by hyperthaumatological degradation to an extent it is visible to the naked eye, see."

Wow, she wasn't kidding. What I could see of flesh was covered in intricate green symbols.

She looked up gesturing pointedly with a scalpel. “Incidentally giving credence to my theory about it being a direct physical impact of an energy causing the problem, not a secondary issue, thank you very much.”

“Jennifer is quite right. It could be a major break through. We’ve been taking samples all over the place. Now, you may ask, what language  are these sigils in? And the answer is some pre-Celtic runic, from who knows when.” Dr. Walid was wearing a puzzled expression on his face, and added, “I thought we had a sacrifice on our hands until I found the wood.”

I grimaced a little. Nightingale had me studying even harder than before, but it tended to be a case of everything went out of the window when a case came up and I had a crash course in what we needed right there and then. "That's pretty much the limit of what I know.  Did you get any vestigia?"

"Oh aye,.." he started to reply and Dr Vaughan cut him off instantly.

"Let him sense it himself without bias," she said in tones that suggested Walid had proposed  massacring puppies or something by jeopardising scientific viability.

"Okay."  I moved closer and tried to focus on filtering out the impressions from the room and focused on the body. The vestigium started to coalesce in my awareness as I filtered out the every day stuff in the morgue.

The crisp tang of bitterly cold snow, inky dark endless night and moving shadows and a growl that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck , and made me step back without thinking.

I was lucky there was no one standing behind me, and Dr Walid chuckled. “What’s that make you think of?”

"Pretty much every fairy tale that exists?" I said. "Deep winter, snow, creatures hunting in the night."

"A primal mythology obviously," Dr Vaughan said, her tone no nonsense as she pulled out a length of intestine. "Now look here..." she gestured to the exposed stomach cavity. "This was where the wood was found and you can clearly see that the hyperthaumatological degradation is in a radiating pattern."

I could see a kidney that had shrivelled up like a diseased bean lurking in the hole - even I could tell that was not normal. It might end up in one of Dr Walid’s jars as part of his object lesson collection along with all his other examples of cauliflower brain.

I thought that HTD it only affected brains, from what I’d seen (not that I was an expert, but it was what I was using as a rule of thumb), but this was amazing in a new sort of way, and terrifying. To get that sort of effect the magical energy would have to be off the charts, if only our current chart wasn’t based on the yap. I had no doubt Toby would be barking his head off at this lump of wood.

“The wood did this tissue damage, and not through impact,” Dr. Walid said, gesturing with care and standing at a distance from what looked like an ordinary if slightly burnt piece of driftwood.

"And we haven't touched that one," she said, her welsh accent compounding her inherent sarcasm. "Can't think why."

"So is the wood some sort of …weapon?" I asked. It occurred to me that a practitioners staff would have to by definition have some protections built in to stop magic radiating like that if it could cause that sort of effect on living tissue.  
It made me wonder about... broken staffs, though I'd never heard of one being broken what with their iron layers core, so that couldn’t be it. Unless it was made by a shoddy magician, that was possible. But it was too thick, and the ends looked... wrong for a broken staff. It looked all the world like a lump of wood. Slightly singed at that.

“No, but it’s definitely imbued. Magically imbued.”

That was alarming. I hadn't really got into talismans and how they worked, and what went wrong and that was pretty much the only other thing it related to aside from devices like demon traps.

  
"So, we need to work out what this is, and how dangerous it is." I said getting my phone out to text Nightingale with a question asking if he knew of something wood that could be imbued with fatal magic. Otherwise I would be going to the internet and the Library to bother Postmartin.

I hoped that Nightingale, a), had his phone on, b), hadn’t blown it out by being easy with magic, and c), was in a position to answer it, without pissing off Mama Thames. The answer wasn’t immediate, but it was misspelled and urgent. I glanced down at the message and felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck. "Uh, we all need to get out of here."  
Nightingale’s message was to the point and abrupt - _' Get out, take wood and go  Hyde prk.  Meet you there. Take them with you, they will have your sent by now."_

Considering Nightingale’s text messages usually sounded like they were penned letters from a period drama, I could practically hear his alarm.

“We can’t leave this body half autopsied,” Jennifer protested. “And we have to take more samples.”  
  
The light flickered and I caught the scent of sharp almost metallic cold. The door rattled and we all glanced around instinctively.  “I think when the lad says now, he means now,” Dr Walid said reaching for a bag on the table behind us.

I fumbled around looking for something wrap the wood in, and grabbed a scarf - Jennifer's from the woolen cashmere texture,  feeling a little like someone trying to wrap plutonium in tissue. It felt like gripping hold of a throttle, a thrum of energy waiting to be unleashed as I swaddled it. It reminded me far too much of the walls of Skygarden before that blew up and then came down.

“Hurry Peter!” Walid shouted and I turned to see him sprinkling something on the floor near the door where darkness seemed to be pooling as liquid shadows.

“Hmm, “ Jennifer stared at the reaction as the shadows pulled away, instinctively leaning closer to peer at the phenomenon. “We’ll have to do some experiments on that. “  
  
“Jennifer – we can look at that later,” Dr Walid said. “I always keep some salt handy.”  
  
“For spirits?” I asked as we beat a hasty retreat out of the door. Salt against spirits was a fairly common bit of folklore.  
  
“For my chips mainly,” he  said and even as worried as I was I couldn’t help but smile as we made an undignified hasty retreat towards the Asbo, Walid sprinkling salt like confetti in front of us as we pelted down the corridors from the morgue, out of the building and towards where I had parked the car.

There was a brief moment where I could see horns, and glowing eyes rippling in and out of perception around the car and I wondered what the hell we were dealing with. Some form of supernatural beast? Demons?  We were pretty sure that demon traps did not have real demons in them but a thousand Hollywood movies couldn’t be wrong.  
We managed to get into the car, and I was pulling away even before we managed to shut the doors properly.  
  
“Any ideas what they are?” I asked a bit breathlessly as Jennifer buckled up her seatbelt,

“Not a bloody clue,” Walid answered, patting down his ginger hair a little. “But glowing eyes isn’t generally a good indication.”  
  
“Text Nightingale for me,” I said trying to out drive the supernatural Klingons that were not affected by the metal in the car as they slithered around the outside as we drove. Not Fae then. “He said to take you and the wood to Hyde park and he would meet us. “  
  
“It’s not exactly small in terms of a destination,” Jennifer pointed out. “And what are we going to do when we get there?”

“Text that,” I said nearly swerving as a clawed hand slammed onto the windscreen.  I felt the itch to turn instantly to magic to push back, but I didn’t want to blow out the car electrics. The claws seemed to be gaining in solidity and I floored the accelerator. “And ask if there is something we can do to fight these things that won’t involving crashing the car.”

There were actual  thumping noises on the roof by the time there was a ping of a response to the text.

“Nightingale says sing to calm them.” Walid answered.

 “Sing?” I couldn’t believe it – it almost seemed like a practical joke being set up.  
Dr Vaughan reached over and turned on the radio, finding Radio 2 instinctively. The signal was crackly but I could make out one of the ever present Christmas tunes. Chris Rea, driving home for Christmas and surprisingly, Jennifer started singing in what was a rich alto. I might not have inherited the musical genes in our family but I could appreciate it in others and also put another mark in my suspicions about Dr Vaughan’s genetics column. X Factor good at singing might be due to an actual X factor, you could never tell.

Walid joined in and turned out to be a solid baritone and much to my relief, the claws stopped trying to scratch their way through windscreen. Apparently singing did help or they were so horrified they backed off. To be fair, if anything were likely to terrify the undead or demonic spirits it would be our singing. I half lalala-ed and sang the odd phrase that I vaguely remembered as I tried to get to Hyde Park through the Christmas traffic. It had been twilight when I’d entered the teaching hospital, and now it was firmly into the evening, with the Christmas lights making a mockery of the night.  
  
“Did he say what they were?” I asked keeping a wary eye on the clinging shapes outside.

“Guize beasts,” Walid said interrupting his rousing rendition of  Fairytale of New York. The pair of them seemed to have the duet covered at least so I tried to remember if Guize beasts were something I should have read about instead of working out how to get the PS4 to work properly in the Coach house.

Old Isaac’s Principia  tended to be more in depth about  forma  rather than folklore so far. I kept hoping Nightingale would relent and somehow magic the knowledge of Latin into my head because it turned out using the wrong conjunction of latin grammar could get messy  and explosive. Nightingale had been faintly horrified at how I once managed to get lux to implode. We’re still not sure what I did. Anyway, I was pretty sure that I didn’t remember even a hint about ‘Guize Beasts’  so that was not that helpful. Still, we were getting close to Hyde Park, not far from Lady Ty’s place and the architecture eyesore that was inexplicably the  most expense block of flats in London. I suspected that I would be even less popular than normal if I gatecrashed her Christmas party with some sort of demon thing in tow.

“He says head towards the Winter Wonderland, and head to the woods on the east side," Walid said as Jennifer carried on singing randomly having broken into Queen Bohemian Rhapsody. We all joined in on that one, it's pretty hard not to.

I wasn’t sure how it would calm the savage beast, whatever kind of beast it was. Guize, that was costuming, right? So masks, and maybe mummers....

I really, really needed to get to google right then but we were nearly at the  area where we would have to stop and make a run for it. "You got any more salt on you, either of you?" I asked hopefully.

"Used it up on the portion of chips I grabbed as we whipped around past the last chippie," Walid said dryly.

"Okay, I've looked up Guize Beasts. Looks like it's a winter solstice tradition in Cornwall," Jennifer said looking up from her phone. "People dress up... do a parade, sing, dance and the Beasts don't attack them. Difficult to tell any other details, my 4G has decided there is no reception  here."

I came to a halt and the scratching over glass began again with more feeling and intent. "Suggestions on how to get to Nightingale?"

 “Sing loudly and dance like an idiot?” Dr Walid looked like he was seconds away from throwing his door open, so clearly wait for rescue was off the damn table.

This was either going to be the most ridiculous death ever or it might just save our bacon. Besides, I could at least use forma out of the car. "Let's go. Run for the trees." I grabbed the scarf wrapped lump of wood and plunged outside into the cold winter air. I did remember something about Solstice from the Principia - Isaac was definitely into astronomical convergences and magic.

It was important and Nightingale had told us to run and go to a point that I realized might be important to have known might be a thing _prior to_ coming up against it. I was forever behind, but I also had to start singing, so I went with Fairytale of New York to keep us going as we’d just heard it in the car and could remember more of the words. At least for a while.

Of all the experiences I've had, for sheer primal fear, being pursued  by shadow demon-things with skeletal  heads gleaming in the reflected light from Winter Wonderland  was right up there. It came as  a bit of a shock to see Nightingale running towards us and see him  gesture a forma that sliced  a tree at the base and sent it toppling towards us.

"Peter! unwrap the Mock!"

What the hell was the Mock?

It took longer than it should have for common sense to kick in. The thing that I did not know why we were transporting it clearly was also the thing that he was calling by some unknown unheard-of name. Matching confusion to name was one of the most important bits of being a practitioner. I unravelled the scarf from around the evil wood.

Instantly the creatures converged on me and I instinctively reacted with an impello, which punched through them like fog. I fell back on lux, producing a brilliant werelight like a halogen spotlight and that had more of an effect. They shrank back from the light but seemed more solid in contrast.

"Don't just carry it Peter, " Nightingale called out. "Chalk it!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about!" I shouted back.

"Didn't you look it up on your internet?" He stood next to the felled tree. Yeah, as if the internet was my personal belonging.

"I was driving!" I protested reaching him finally, Walid and Jennifer just behind me, Jennifer swearing in welsh under her breath.

 “Ugh.” That was a surprisingly pissy response form his usual composed self and I could detect a hint of Lesley there in that mannerism which distracted me for a moment.. And then he threw something at me, and I caught it one-handed.

Chalk.

"Draw a stick figure on it," Jennifer instructed sounding a lot calmer than I felt.  "That's what they do. Then light it on fire."

Lighting things on fire I was good at, and my stick figures were honed by many years of graffiti on school tables and books in my youth. I scrawled my best stick figure saying under my breath, "There you go, it's him you want not me," before torching the bit of wood with a heat filled lux.

And then, feeling like I was catching on, to the world around me, I tossed it at the downed tree. Because that, that was for a bonfire, yeah? I might not recognise a Mock, but I was getting the gist about a yule log.

Instantly it was not just that  the area filled with firelight but that we could all feel some force emanating from  the flames, something beneficent, something that banished the darkness and started spreading slowly outwards. The shapes of the Guize beasts wavered and dissolved in the growing fire light.

"Well, that was close," Nightingale said brushing off bits of tree from his jacket. "Have a seat, we'll be here a while."

 “Can I get the short version of what this was?” I felt a little out of breath and anxious, and Dr. Walid was grinning at me like a crazed Scottish loon.

“Bloody Yule log from hell. Was he transporting it, from where, though?”

"He stole it from Mama Thames' hearth," Nightingale said looking very grave as if that explained it all.

"Still going to need the Cliff notes version," I said taking the opportunity to sit. The adrenalin was fading off and that always left certain muscles feeling a bit wobbly.  Anyone attempting to steal anything from Mama Thames surely had a bit of a death wish, so it didn't seem like a logical  move by any of the enemies I knew about.

"It would appear that someone tried to perpetrate an act of magical terrorism," Nightingale said showing he had been listening to the Prevent training too. "One of the fundamentals of the season is that the winter solstice is a pivot point. On the solstice day, the balance shifts from longest night towards the return of the light – the Sol Invictus.”  
The unconquerable Sun – Let it not be said that I’m not learning some latin.

“ There are millennia of tradition, folklore that have built up around this rule of nature. One of the prevailing ones is that a Yule log must be lit on the solstice and burned through yuletide and that the last piece is preserved, bestowing great protection, luck and good fortune on the home of the owner where it is kept." Nightingale said.

And the owner of this  piece was Mama Thames, meaning the whole of London was her home. I winced a bit thinking of the impact of a blanket of bad luck across the city.  Police are very attuned to luck – so many crisis’s are averted due to a tiny moment of realising a tiny detail was not right. Bad luck would be a disaster magnified with so many people living close together.

“One of the Rivers going to come around to take it home after?” Thievery, transport, touching it, all yielding what I suspected was the rather unlucky fate of our dead body.

"Yes, but it has been lit at the correct time," Nightingale said. “So the immediate danger is past. We must remain vigil and make sure the log remains burning. Then they can take it.”

"So the green sigils," Jennifer asked after a brief moment of silence listening to the fire crackle. "Were they a by product of the Mock? Because that doesn’t seem particularly lucky to end up fried from the inside out."

"Aye,  we had pre celtic bindrunes," Walid said sitting close to the fire.

"That explains one mystery," Nightingale nodded. "They were most likely concealing or presence dampening runes. Our perpetrator most likely relied on them to be able to enter and smuggle the wood out by swallowing it. The Rivers wards and security are not to be trifled with."

"But surely he knew it would kill him?" I asked. "I mean, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion."

“Did he, though? We still haven’t worked out who he was,” Dr. Walid commented as he settled to cross legged in front of the fire. “You’d be surprised at how many people think that they will be exception to any rule.”

“Well, Harold Trescothick is probably a fake ID,” I put in. “I’ll have to run it through the system.”  
Perhaps the Mock was lucky after all – that meant a free pass from Oxford street duty. I tried not to sound too happy about it.

“It could take days,” Nightingale said gravely, but I could see in the firelight that slight half smile quirking at the corner of his mouth. You couldn’t get anything past the Tiger-killer.

“I’m slightly disappointed,” Jennifer said after a moment, staring into the flames. “I nearly had an actual substance to experiment on that radiates out magical energy. “ Said sample was crackling away merrily keeping us very warm on a cold winters night.  
  
“So many experiments..” Walid said dreamily. “We could have made  some  progress in determining the nature of magic itself. Even by process of elimination.”

“I wholeheartedly support this,” I said. “If it gets me out of the continuous MRI’s. It’s like sticking your head inside an engine.”  
  
“I won't even ask how you know what that is like. I have a theory,” Jennifer said. “That magic is a concentrated form of a naturally occurring energy. That causes direct measurable physical trauma to brain tissue.”  
  
“I believe the Principia indicates that this could be the case,” Nightingale agreed.

“You’re going to start talking about ruby lasers again,” Walid said which gave me the impression that this was something they discussed frequently.

I did know something about that, science lessons at school for some reason stuck in my head. “Oh, like light passing through something and being made coherent and focused?” And able to burn, explode or read a CD. I could see the process.

“Exactly. It doesn’t explain all the phenomenon, but logic would say there is a mechanism. The process of creating forma is most likely the focal process. “ She said, her features animated by the firelight. It struck me as odd that she was not agitated about the fact we had left a body on a slab. Dr Vaughan was very focused on her work to a point where even Walid, who would gleefully turn out of bed in the middle of the night for something Falcon would joke about it. I realised then that I too had no inclination to move away from the firelight – something more subtle than a compulsion charm but now I was feeling for it, I felt it there. Like it or not we were going nowhere until we were relieved of our vigil duties.

“Sometimes it is better to let certain things be a mystery,” Nightingale said and I knew he was thinking of Ettersberg. There were times where my science fiction and fantasy influenced brain laid the sudden resurgence of practitioners around now at the experiments that Nightingale alluded to at Ettersberg. Had they been trying to breed the genes in? Or had there been chimeric studies?

“I disagree. If you know a process you can circumvent it,” Jennifer said. “Make it work in conditions it could not, fix issues, prevent dangerous side effect. That an energy exists is certain..”  
  
And that it was tied up with life energy was another certainty. Look at Nightingale and a few of the others ageing backwards. Was it just our old school training that made the difference? It couldn't be or they would all be doing it.  
  
“So why do some practitioners have issues and others do not?” I asked.  
  
“That is most definitely the question, see,” Jennifer said nodding sharply. "A lack of consistency in effect."  
  
“I believe the damage is leakage,” Walid put in. “To put it simply. A by product. “  
  
“Unskilled people sloshing things around?” I asked. “But if that was the case anyone starting off would fry their brains in short order.”

“Maybe you have,” Jennifer pointed out archly and Walid snorted next to her.

“Aha, I have not and I have the MRI’s to prove it!” I replied. I had my suspicions that Nightingale had upped the introduction of the staff  construction and wielding as I seemed to be going toe to toe with a highly skilled enemy and could easily be in a situation to have to over reach my bounds. No, what was it he was always saying? Construct the forma completely, focus it, release. That you had to learn things in order, to control things properly. Lady Helena was the expert in healing and she did retreats for balancing body, mind and spirit. She'd talked about balance a lot.

“Balance!” I blurted out.

“What lad?” Walid asked.

“You told me about biological natural systems always seeking balance,” I said waving my hands around in the firelight. “Physical laws too.”

“Osmosis?” Dr Vaughan seemed intrigued and I could see Nightingale looking a bit bemused.

“Yeah, yeah like…the solstice. Light and dark. Things seek balance don’t they? So okay, say your forma creates a…partition of will like the uh.. membrane,” I said trying to get the words out and dredging them out of memory.

“Semi-permeable membrane,” Walid corrected “But I think I get your gist. It would allow you to make a  temporary concentration of energy or substance.”  
  
“And if incorrectly formed, the natural leakage is from a high concentration to a low,” Jennifer said thoughtfully.   
  
"Thaumotic pressure," Walid interjected gleefully, grinning at having made up another term. "A marked differential in thaumotic pressure could cause uncontrolled emissions."

Jennifer just raised her eyebrows at him for that statement.  Mentally I suspected there was a whole lot of welsh swearing going on.

“That would explain the necessity of thoroughly learning the lower powered forma,” Nightingale agreed. “I suspect most …ethically challenged practitioners skip the boring bits, or people get sloppy without drilling and experience and eventually try a forma that lets uncontrolled energies into their system.”

“Like the solstice. The lump of wood on it’s own was dangerous but focused as part of the ritual it was positive,” I said as if that solved the problem.

“It’s an interesting avenue of inquiry,” Dr Walid said thoughtfully. “Equilibrium as an underlying principle. Homeostasis.”  
  
“Just as some people have naturally more hormones, it could follow they naturally have more of…whatever it is..”  
  
“Midi-chlorians,” I supplied facetiously and Walid mock glared at me.

“We swore an Oath to never speak of  that ever again,” he replied and I actually heard Jennifer smother a sound of amusement.

“I foresee many tests in your future,” she said. “I’ll start making a list.”

It was then I felt a loosing of the compulsion around us and looked around instinctively.

“Ah, it would appear our replacements are here,” Nightingale said unerringly spotting our visitors and the very familiar figure leading the group. “Welcome to the hearth of Mother Thames.”

“How nice of you to light it on my doorstep,” Tyburn replied trailed by a group of the other Rivers. “Very convenient. We will take the vigil from here.”  
  
“Our thanks are passed to you for preserving the fortune of our home,” Nightingale said formally and gestured for us to stand. I was busy looking for Bev, and I was hoping her absence meant she was back at her place.

“Your duty is discharged,” she answered and we reluctantly moved.  There was something addictive about sitting next to the source of good fortune for London. It looks like the Rivers had come prepared with food and drink which we notably did not get offered and were settling in for what Seawoll would describe as a ‘right bloody piss up’.  
  
“Why PC Grant, thank you for your hard work, we owe you one,” I muttered under my breath.

“I suspect they believe we have had our reward,” Nightingale said as we walked back to the car. “”It is a place of honour to sit vigil to the Mock. Lucky.”  
  
“Lucky?” I asked even as Dr Vaughan and Walid  were having a spirited debate about their latest theory as we returned to the Asbo, still unfortunately in one piece. “We were nearly torn apart by weird spirit beasts.”

“And yet you were not. Like I said, lucky,” Nightingale said. He looked at me seriously. “And I think we’re going to need all the luck we can get next year aren’t we?”

Yeah, yeah we were. Lesley instantly drifted into my thoughts and I just couldn’t seem to shake my delusions that this was some big joke, she would somehow be on our side because I couldn’t face the fact that the first person I had told or shown about any of this, who I trusted as a partner had literally tazed me in the back. Luck would be only one of the things I needed. Anger management was another.

“”Yeah. The Lucky Starling that’s me,” I said as we reached the car.

Nightingale smiled. “”There are worse nicknames to cultivate. Worse indeed. Merry yuletide Peter.”  
  
Well, with several days in the warm hunting down our dead body’s identity would count as a definite plus so I shook off the melancholy long enough to say, “And a happy Solstice to you too guv.”

Maybe this year I’d drop in on him, Molly, Toby and Varvara on Christmas day. Might as well put that luck to the test early on.

 


End file.
